huh? how is it unfair?

40% pay increment and 7.3k?

that means before 40% pay bump, guy was drawing 5.1 - 5.2k monthly.

for a SWE role, that's quite low, in fact most tech programs pay freshies 5.5k and above already with citibank programs paying 6.5k and all these programs are quite easy to get in with no CS / IT degree requirement.

7.3k is quite standard for most SWEs with 1 - 2 years of experience.

the easiest way to benchmark tech pay is to find the easiest tech role that anyone can get into first and use that pay as a starting base, for this example, i will use tech programs from banks

Goldman sachs program pays roughly 6k+ a month, bonus 1-2 months
DBS SEED pays 5.5k a month, bonus 2-3 months
Citibank pays 6.5k a month, bonus 1 month

if we compute their total comp, it goes like this

goldman: 84k TC ( $6000 * 12 + 12000 bonus )
DBS: 82k TC ( $5.5k * 12 + 16500 bonus )
citi: 84.5k TC ( $6.5k * 12 + 6.5k bonus )

for this example, we will assume all companies pay max bonus, just to make comparisons easier.

Now let's compare to F500 companies and similar tech companies like Visa

VISA fresh SWE is 6.5k + 20% bonus off annual, with 10k USD stock vesting 3 years. ( i got friends in here )

6.5k * 12 = 78000,
20% off 78000 = $15600 bonus
10k USD stock vesting 3 years = end of year 1 = 3.3k USD rough estimate, let's assume stock price dips quite bad and you decide to sell when it is down 40% ( again, just rough estimate ), that's about 1980 USD convert to SGD, let's be nice and take the worst exchange possible, 2500 SGD instead of 2600+ SGD.

So TC: 78000 + 15600 + 2500 = $96100 SGD from VISA SWE.



never look at big pay bumps and think that it's a good thing. companies dont just anyhow give you 20-40% pay bump because u did well lol they do it because they know u got lowballed as fk and they need to adjust to market rate otherwise u run away to other companies.

last time citibank tech program also pay 5.4k then they bump it to 6.5k suddenly, that's a 20% bump for doing nothing.


good luck, always make sure u know how much u earn compared to the market rate, dont get scammed.